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Great prose teaches by contact. Read the passage first. Form your own impression. Then click "annotate" to see what the rules would say.
Abraham Lincoln · Gettysburg Address · 1863 · 272 words
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.
Frederick Douglass · Narrative of the Life · 1845
Very soon after I went to live with Mr. and Mrs. Auld, she very kindly commenced to teach me the A, B, C. After I had learned this, she assisted me in learning to spell words of three or four letters. Just at this point of my progress, Mr. Auld found out what was going on, and at once forbade Mrs. Auld to instruct me further, telling her, among other things, that it was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read.
"If you give a nigger an inch, he will take an ell. A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master — to do as he is told to do. Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world."
These words sank deep into my heart, stirred up sentiments within me which may be said to have then slumbered, and called into existence an entirely new train of thought. It was a new and special revelation, explaining dark and mysterious things, with which my youthful understanding had struggled, but struggled in vain. I now understood what had been to me a most perplexing difficulty — to wit, the white man's power to enslave the black man. It was a grand achievement, and I prized it highly. From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom.
Charles Darwin · On the Origin of Species · 1859 · closing paragraph
It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the life of a higher animal, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
Mark Twain · Letter to George Bainton · 1888
The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter — it's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.
Reading list
Prose that trains your ear. Read any of these for craft, not just content.
| Leaves of Grass | Whitman (1855). Long breath, parallel structure, rhythmic accumulation. The opposite of Strunk, and it works. |
| Narrative of the Life | Douglass (1845). Every sentence carries moral weight. Teaches you that clarity is an ethical act. |
| Essays | Bacon (1597). Maximum meaning per sentence. Read "Of Studies" and count the wasted words. There are none. |
| Huckleberry Finn | Twain (1884). American English unchained. The voice is the argument. |
| War and Peace | Tolstoy (1869, Garnett trans.). Scene-level clarity at novel scale. Every battlefield, every drawing room, every death — concrete. |
| The Elements of Style | Strunk (1918). Read it once a year. Forty-three pages. |
| Collected Essays | Orwell, Baldwin, Didion. The twentieth-century essay at its best. Copyrighted — find them in libraries. |
From the blog
Skills over SDKs — the highlights above are the same checks as the humanize and readability skills, written as prose- Double Loop — the editorial process this tool automates one piece of